It's summer, so let's mix sports with some reality TV

AP PhotoNew York's Alex Rodriguez could be the next contestant on "The Bachelor."

With the arrival of summer comes the dog days of television, when you find yourself sitting through the episode of "Jon and Kate Plus 8" where Mady gets her ears pierced for the fifth time and wondering where your life went wrong.

Granted, most people actually have lives and don't spend their frequent down moments sitting in front of the boob tube.

But when intermittent flooding forces you to abandon the beach, porch or tree fort (Man, what I wouldn't give for an adult-sized tree fort! But that's a blog for another day ... ), you find out just how depressingly low the quality of TV programming is at 4 p.m. on a weekday.

Unless you happen to find SpongeBob SquarePants a trippy comedic adventure. Which I now do.

Otherwise the rest of the summer schedule is stuffed with reruns, "Best of" specials and a continuous loop of Matthew McConaughey movies.

And, of course, there's reality TV.

Reality TV has been around seemingly since the advent of cable, most frequently in some sort of game-show mode. Which makes for a striking comparison with sports.

And if various producers, directors and other Hollywood types aren't going to fill the summer months with quality programming, the least they could do is offer up something that's sports related.

Fortunately, I have a few suggestions. They may be terrible, but at least they're a start. And there's no bad ideas in brainstorming, right?: